5 Very Specific, Editor-Tested, Japanese Drugstore Products for the Glowy-est Skin

In her new column, High Five, for ELLE.com, ELLE Beauty Director Emily Dougherty shares the smartest, prettiest, best–est beauty products in the world. Follow her on Instagram @emilydougherty for more.

I'd fly 13 hours for just 10 minutes in a Tokyo drugstore. Really. But thanks to Amazon, most of my favorite Japanese glowy-skin essentials are just a click away.

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Kanebo Suisai Beauty Clear Powder

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An essential for travel, these tiny pods contain a single dose of a gentle enzyme-based exfoliating powder that activates on contact with water. Redditors argue as to whether the powder's efficacy changes based on the pH of the water coming out of your tap, but I've used it around the world with success. If you are a nervous flier, try shaking a few of the containers in your hands as if they were dice—it relaxes me every time!

When I was pregnant last year and flooded with collagen-building estrogen, my skin looked so fresh and radiant that people kept saying "you've got K-Beauty skin!" But a few months after my little guy was born, the glow faded. Fortunately, ELLE's own April Long had just come back from a trip to China where she ate collagen-packed foods such as birds' nests and donkey candy, and her skin had never looked better. Then ELLE Genius facialist Kristina Holey gave me her post-pregnancy glow prescription: a daily topical Vitamin C (my favorite is Odacite's C for Colette) plus frequent consumption of Hakata Tonton's pigs' foot soup. I'm not a big fan of eating feet, so I started tossing back the OG of collagen boosters, Shiseido's liquid collagen shots. I first tried these about ten years ago thanks to makeup artist Jeanine Lobell (@jeaninelobell—she's overwhelmingly famous in Tokyo—people would stop us on the street to ask her for her autograph). Lobell, Long, and Holey all have the most amazingly glowy skin, and the thing they all have in common (other than my eternal friendship): ingestible collagen! The Shiseido collagen boosters aren't vegan—the collagen is derived from fish—but they do work, and they don't taste fishy at all: after three weeks of a daily shot, my skin got visibly bouncier. (You can also buy powder and pill versions from Shiseido on Amazon.)

There's something intensely satisfying about seeing old, gross, dead skin come off your body easily and painlessly—which is why the famous Baby Foot's effects (which ELLE covered back in 2010) are so mesmerizing. The Cure, a gel exfoliator designed for the face, delivers a much more gentle yet equally satisfying effect in just minutes. Rub a dime-sized amount of the Cure anywhere you need a little brightening and, within a minute, disgustingly fantastic balls of skin will start rolling off. There is some debate on the Beauty Brains regarding what really is in this magic exfoliator: When Beauty Brains's Randy Schueller reviewed Cure in 2014, he posited that the little balls are not skin, but just a side effect of the formula's water evaporating and releasing a polymer. But fans disagree: Kikkat, one Beauty Brains reader, burned the balls! "And it smelled like burning skin. (I'm a welder and I know what burnt skin smells like.)" I haven't gone as far as Kikkat, but I did test it on various surfaces, and it only created the little balls when I used it on skin that was in desperate need of exfoliation. And after I thoroughly exfoliated, if I reapplied the product, I didn't get any additional rub-off. I can completely understand why one bottle of this sells every 12 seconds in Japan: I want to use it from head to my tippy toes—it might even replace Baby Foot in my routine.

Another bright skin essential, these Vitamin-C based supplements were first recommended to elle.com senior beauty editor Julie Schott by ELLE Genius nail artist Naomi Yasuda (@naominailsnyc) , who always has the glowiest skin backstage at any show. In addition to collagen-building C, these shiny little pills (they look like white M&Ms) contain L-cysteine, an amino acid found to block the production of melanin. (L-cysteine also been linked to a suppression in gherlin, the so-called 'hunger hormone.') Yum!

Technically, this isn't skincare, but it's the fastest route to glowy skin. ELLE Beauty Genius Kaoru Okubo (@kaorururu27)—the makeup artist responsible for the juicy, flushed cheeks in many of J Crew's catalogs—got Jenna Lyons, as well as the entire ELLE beauty team, addicted to this easy-going cheek tint. My favorite shade is the clean and bright Clear Red, a neutral cherry stain which works on everyone, but I also love coral Clear Happiness (mostly just for the name).

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